Quiz time, again

Aaron posted answers to this quiz a couple of weeks ago. Luckily, Aaron posts so infrequently that his answers are likely to be his top front-page post for the foreseeable future. Heh!

Er...anyway, here are my answers, just because.

1. It is Dan's theory that one only has time to devote to 10 outside-of-work pursuits. What makes your list? This can be an idealized version of your life (e.g. pursuits in which you are interested but just haven't found the time or ambition to start).

1. Little Quinn.
2. The Daughter.
3. Little Quinn, again.
4. The Daughter, again.
5. Reading.
6. Writing. (I'm including the blog here.)
7. Listening to music. (And I mean actively listening, not just sticking in a CD while I do the dishes. Although I do that, too.)
8. Movies and good TV shows.
9. Little Quinn and the Daughter.
10. Walking. (Not so much of this lately.)

2. What are the last five albums you bought? Are you just kind of buying albums on a whim these days or following any kind of overarching plan-such as exploring a genre or working your way through a backlog of albums you've wanted to buy for some time?

Hisato Ohzawa: Piano Concerto #3 and Symphony No. 3 (classical)
Alla Pavlova: Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 3 (classical)
Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble: Beyond the Horizon (Asian)
Altan: Local Ground (Celtic)
Anna Netrebko: Sempre Libera (classical; operatic arias and extracts)

I look around blogs and websites and magazines for CD recommendations, and then I keep a little list to grab when I'm at Borders. Many times, I go in to buy a particular CD, and walk out with three CDs, none of which are the one I intended to grab. Nice thing about having wide-ranging musical tastes is that I can indulge a certain amount of capriciousness in my music purchasing.

3. Everyone has an issue (at least one)-political or philosophical-that is kind of their personal baby. One on which they feel they have an enlightened view in a greater world that just either doesn't get it or doesn't care. Tell us about it-and attempt to be brief.

Respect for science in general, with evolution in particular. The extent to which science is held as "just another competing worldview" today scares me, especially when so many of the problems facing us now are problems for which we're really going to need to lean on science for solutions.

4. Prairie, mountains, woods, desert, lake, the sea. Which calls to you the most? Where would you most choose to reside? RANK THEM!

Uhhhh...this one's intriguing:

1. Sea. (I'm going to cheat and lump the Great Lakes in with "Sea", on the basis that in general you can't see the other side of them when you're on the shore.)
2. Lake.
3. Mountains.
4. Woods.
5. Prairie.
6. Desert.

I wouldn't really want to live in either of the last two, although they make nice places to travel. But I need forests, topography, and not so much heat.

5. Guilty pleasure TV. Is there a show that would be condemned by your peers, but yet you find yourself watching it on a regular basis? Let's hear it.

Well, most of my friends know I like American Idol, and more than a few also watch it, so that's out (although most find my admiration of Bo Bice slightly "over the top"). The Apprentice, perhaps? I still watch that show, although I haven't decided if I'll bother watching the Martha Stewart version. In the mid-90s, I loved Beavis and Butthead, which I held to be mostly satirical in nature: I knew kids like that in school, and really, the show's timeslot was perfect. (There is no better show to watch at two in the morning when you've closed your pizza restaurant on a busy Friday night than Beavis and Butthead.)

So since I can't answer this with a TV show, how about a singer, instead? Most people react with derision when I tell them that I love Celine Dion.

This is a tag-free quiz, so do it if you're inclined, and ignore it if you're not.

Bow before your OverGoogleLords!

Google now has a search utility for blogs only: blogsearch.google.com. Someday, our very souls will be indexed by Google.

The Love Boat: Buffalo

Cruise ships on the Great Lakes? Scoff not, denizens of doubt!

Wouldn't that be a kick? Imagine being able to board a cruise liner in Buffalo and travel to, say, Cleveland or even Chicago and back. Or a cruise around the northern waters of Lake Superior. Or the harbors of Huron.

Who needs Caribbean cruises, anyway?

B-b-but Karl said the polls couldn't go that low! I'm beloved, I tell you!

(Political rant here)

So I see that President Bush has accepted the blame for the Federal government's less-than-adequate response to Hurricane Katrina. Good for him.

And, to indulge more bluntness than I usually allow myself here, screw him.

This was not the contrition of a President come to grips with a serious policy gaffe; this was the act of a President who has strenuously denied reality for weeks until the public opinion polls finally could no longer be ignored. This is the man who acted to pass the buck to anyone and everyone he could think of, including the massively unqualified political crony he'd put in charge and who'd then mucked up the job in question (but not before trying to publicly praise the man for his "great job"), and then tried trotting out the tsk-tsk talking point of "not playing the blame game". For years I've listened to conservatives insist that Bill Clinton governed by opinion poll, so color me unimpressed that George W. Bush is doing the same thing. Especially after he fiddled strummed while Rome burned New Orleans flooded.

Did the local and state governments screw up? You'd better believe it, and screw them, too. But looking at this Katrina timeline, the most damning line is this:

BUSH GOES TO BED WITHOUT ACTING ON BLANCO’S REQUESTS

Here's the President, with the Governors of one of his states having declared an official state of emergency three days before, and now strongly reiterating her request for help from the Presidential level...turning in for the night.

And then there's this, from the President's statement today:

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government," Bush said at joint White House news conference with the president of Iraq.

"To the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," Bush said.

The president was asked whether people should be worried about the government's ability to handle another terrorist attack given failures in responding to Katrina.

"Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack? That's a very important question and it's in the national interest that we find out what went on so we can better respond," Bush replied.

He said he wanted to know both what went wrong and what went right.

Well, the President wants to know what went wrong. Sounds like a job for one of those Congressional hearing committee things. If only we had a Congress that thought that executive oversight was something to be done for Republican Presidents.

And isn't it a bit chilling that the President is admitting that he just doesn't know if his government is ready to suit up in the event of a severe terrorist attack? This is the President who was re-elected a little less than a year ago on a campaign consisting of little more than, "If you elect my opponent, you will probably die in a massive terrorist attack. I am gonna keep you safe; he is gonna get you killed. You're safe with me, America. I got your back." (And don't even try claiming that this wasn't the subtext of the President's re-election campaign. Here's how one prominent right-wing blogger summed it up.)

Except, well...he didn't when he had four days' notice that something bad was about to happen, and he doesn't have the first clue if he'll have our back when he learns of the event as Andy Card whispers it in his ear whilst in mid-photo op. Now here he is, safely in office and free from the concerns of seeking re-election again, and he can stand up and say, "Gee whiz, folks, I don't know if you're safe. We gotta figure that one out. It's quite the headscratcher."

I'm glad he's going to take this stuff seriously now. It's nice to think that maybe we'll now have a President who takes policy seriously, and who doesn't staff his crucial departments with cronies.

Then again, maybe I shouldn't hold my breath. E.J. Dionne notwithstanding, it's a long time until January 20, 2009.

(And no, I'm not arguing about what a hypothetical "President Kerry" would have done. I'm angry about what the all-too-real "President Bush" actually did do.)

EDIT: Broken link removed completely, as I ended up using the link in another place but forgot to remove the HTML code.

Being Prolific

Lynn ruminates a bit on Alan Hohvanhess, the American composer of mystical bent who produced quite a lot of music. LOTS of music. The man was a fountain of music. Lynn's point of concentration is on the question of whether producing a large output necessarily means that the quality of that output suffers.

The answer is, of course, Yes. Except for when the answer is No.

It's tempting to scoff at the very idea of balancing prolificity with quality. "Look at Mozart!" we think. "As Kochel counted them, old Wolfgang A. produced 626 pieces in just 35 years, and the vast majority of those pieces are of high quality, with some being among the greatest musical works ever produced! QED!" And yes, those who argue against the idea that being prolific gets in the way of being good run into trouble here: they either have to discard their thesis, or argue that maybe the corpus of Mozart's work really isn't that good, after all. "Well, really -- maybe you'll regularly hear six or seven of the symphonies, but who cares about the other thirty-four? And yeah, Die Zauberflote and Le Nozze di Figaro are genius, but is anyone banging down the doors at the Met to get the good seats when they dust off Idomeneo?"

Of course, that argument doesn't get very far. Fact is, most folks will scoff at any argument whose crucial thesis lies in positing Mozart as fully subject to Sturgeon's Law as anyone else. And that provides the answer, really: Mozart's the freakish exception. Surely there were other prolific composers of Mozart's day -- how much music did poor Salieri write? -- but those guys' scores gather dust, while Mozart still lives on. So, maybe you can be prolific and good. But to pull that off, you merely have to be a genius.

I recall an essay I once read by Isaac Asimov, in which he described the life of a prolific writer. I seem to recall him implying that quality was, in fact, a secondary concern to the prolific person, but then, Dr. Asimov often wrote his essays from a tongue-in-cheek standpoint. Did Asimov produce some great work? Absolutely. Did he also produce some clunkers? Yup. So, I suspect, did Hohvanhess.

One thing that has stuck with me from the Asimov essay was that if you're going to be a prolific writer, you have to really like writing -- and not much else besides writing. I wonder if Alan Hohvanhess liked not much else besides composition?

(I don't have any real opinion of Hohvanhess's music. I haven't particularly liked the works of his that I've heard, but I've only heard two of his works, which is, as we well know, not a representative sample. And the two works that I have heard, I listened to over five years ago. So I suspect that his work is due another listen, one of these days.)

This is what I'm sayin'.

That's what Paul Buchman, on Mad About You, was always saying to his wife, Jamie. For a time in the 90s, Mad About You was one of my favorite shows -- I loved its way of taking delight in urban life, its general lack of Seinfeldian cynicism, and the warm chemistry between Paul and Jamie, played by Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt. Of course, Mad About You spent two or maybe even three seasons on the air longer than it should have (its last episode was quite good, but its last season was pretty much of a disaster). Helen Hunt, of course, went on to stardom and became an Oscar winner, while Reiser slipped into a much lower profile, and in general, the mild success of Mad About You (it was never a ratings juggernaut, just a solid show for six seasons) was attributed largely to Hunt.

But reading this brief article by Reiser in today's Huffington Post, I'm wondering if that's really fair. Mad About You wasn't a brilliant show, but in its best episodes, it displayed a pretty insightful view of the loving relationships between men and women, and it's clear that this theme is still driving Reiser in his post-Mad work.

It seems that Reiser has made a movie, starring Peter Falk, called The Thing About My Folks. Here's the money paragraph, which stopped me cold as soon as I read it quoted in full over at Lance Mannion's blog:

I always wished I could have known my parents before they were parents. I would love to have known who they were before they became the 70-year-olds I saw nodding off together to Tom Brokaw every night. There was great love between them for sure. But it must have been somehow different fifty years ago. What happened to those people? How did they become these people? My guess is it didn't happen overnight, but gradually, imperceptibly. Like a glacier of routine and compromise. We end up the sum of all the things we do, and -- for whatever reason -- don't do. Day after day, year after year, we become all the words we never speak, the trips we never take, the effort we never make and the love we never share.

Dammit, I wish I'd written that.

Re-rolling the joint

I've just done some updating of the master blogroll, available here (and permanently linked in the sidebar), adding a few new blogs and removing a few that had gone inactive. (I do still check in on the inactive ones, via a folder in my bookmarks.) Nice things about maintaining the master blogroll off the main page are that it's easier to format within a post rather than in the raw HTML of the main template, and I don't run afoul of the "Holy crap, this blogroll is a mile long!" factor.

Heh. Indeed.

I wanted to preserve this comment, left in response to this post at Alicublog, just because I found it funny and because the commenter in question doesn't seem to have a blog of his or her own:

Give a man a fish, feed him for a day.

Teach a man to fish, feed him for life.

Explain to a man that he's not starving to death because of a lack of fish per se, and it's not the fact that it's illegal to fish and in fact there are a host of other problems that prevent him from fishing much less learning to fish especially given the price of good reels these days -- no no it's the inner disorders that prevent him from learning to fish, or maybe it's not quite that, but -- LISTEN I'M NOT GIVING YOU ANY F***ING FISH, OKAY?!

Isn't that the truth.

(Link to Alicublog via Dr. Myers)

Primary Inversions

Tomorrow is Primary Election Day here in Western New York. The big one is the Democratic endorsement for Mayor of Buffalo, with "establishment" candidate Byron Brown (a career pol) versus a local activist named Kevin Gaughan. Buffalo's current Mayor, Anthony Masiello, is stepping down at the end of this, his third term.

I won't be voting in tomorrow's primary, for a very good reason: I don't actually live in Buffalo. I live in one of Buffalo's southern, outlying suburbs -- in fact, to drive to Buffalo proper, I first have to traverse two or even three closer suburbs, depending on which way I go. But I do have a horse in this fight, for the most basic reason: the economic vitality of this entire region depends on Buffalo. So I may not have a vote, but as a citizen of the Buffalo-Niagara region, I most definitely have an interest at stake.

So my "vote", virtual though it may be, goes to Kevin Gaughan.

Nothing against Byron Brown, really. I'm sure he's a conscientious public servant who loves his mother. But Buffalo has just had twelve years under a Mayor whose main qualification was not his set of interesting ideas but his status as a conscientious public servant who loves his mother, and electing Byron Brown would just be electing "Masiello Lite", or "Masiello Amber", or "Masiello Special Draft", or something similar. It would mean a different nameplate on the mayor's desk, and that's about it.

Everybody knows that one of Buffalo's biggest problems is the hardening of its political machinery to the point that it resembles a ship that's been in port for far too long and has become so encrusted with barnacles that its prow won't cleave the water the right way anymore. But as a wise person once said, "A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are for." Byron Brown will keep Buffalo in port at a time when the city really needs to set sail.

Kevin Gaughan for Mayor. Please oh please. It's not just Buffalo that needs this. Orchard Park needs it too. As does West Seneca. And Hamburg. And Lackawanna. And Blasdell. And Cheektowaga. And Amherst. And Williamsville. And...you get the idea.

I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Hindemith's "Mathis der Maler"....

A few days ago, Terry Teachout ruminated a bit on the idea of "living in a piece of music", inspired to do so by this post by Heather at In the Wings. Setting aside the question that immediately arises -- "How the heck do you live in a piece of music?" -- I've been thinking a bit about it.

I find that it's a blend of two factors, really: visual and emotive. It's partly about what I "see" when I listen to a given bit of music, and partly about what a given bit of music makes me feel. Now, over the years, I've come to almost consciously avoid approaching music from a visual standpoint. Since my first real exposure to extended orchestral music came via filmscores, I tended to indulge the visual aspect, to the point of using things like the Star Wars soundtrack LPs as a means of re-experiencing the film. But then, I had a teacher who rather dramatically illustrated to me that music need not cue any one visual at all, and I was off to the races. Now, I buy filmscores only if I like the music, and I now refuse to limit myself to buying scores to films I've seen.

What does this have to do with "living in music"? Well, it's a matter of approach, really. My own journeys through any musical landscape (or soundscape, I suppose) are based on feeling and emotion than on any sense of visual stimulation; likewise, I tend to prize emotion and feel over form. But anyway, staying with what I take to be the sense of the question, here are a few pieces of music that maybe I wouldn't specifically want to inhabit, but maybe visit once in a while:

Bach, Mass in B-minor. The part of me that automatically looks up upon entering any house of worship would be at home here, I think.

Mozart, Symphony No. 40 in G-minor. I know what I just said about form, but Mozart's just so good at form -- and if form is done supremely well, as it always is with Wolfgang A., the appreciation of form can itself be an emotion, in the sense of that cosmic sense of wonder I get when standing in a field at night looking up at the stars.

Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique. Here's good emotion winning out over bad form -- the first movement in particular is pretty disjointed, as Berlioz's grasp of sonata allegro form isn't terribly good. He's constantly stopping and starting rather than making convincing transitions, and at one point he goes up and down the chromatic scale before reaching one of his dead-stops. But the raw feeling of this thing -- yeah, I want to live in this piece for a while. It's a work of intense emotion, dominated by Berlioz's fiery love (or, more accurately, obsessive infatuation) with an actress he saw on stage, and at one point driven by the fantasies of an opiate madman. Who wouldn't want to go into that piece for a while?

Rachmaninov, Symphony No. 2 in E-minor. Longtime readers will know that I'm often mentioning this piece. It's the most perfect expression of Romantic melancholy that I know.

Pink Floyd, The Wall. I'd probably open a vein if I actually lived inside this album. But maybe not.

Who were those competent helmeted men?

Dear Rest of the NFL,

Don't worry about our quarterback situation. We're fine.

Love,
The Buffalo Bills

OK, it wasn't perfect. The Bills had five instances of entering the Red Zone in which they only came away with field goals, for instance. The running game was decent in the second half, but took most of the first half to get going. And so on. But it was quite a heartening start to the season.

The good thing was basically the poise with which J.P. Losman played in his first NFL start. He never really looked rattled or confused, and the coaches let him throw on the very first play from scrimmage and he was able to settle into a rhythm pretty quickly. Losman only made one or two outright errors in throwing, and neither cost the Bills (although, had a Houston defender managed to hold onto the ball, one would have cost them dearly as the guy had nothing but daylight between him and the end zone).

I'm not ready to revise my rather pessimistic preseason prediction yet (I had the Bills finishing 6-10). Playing well in a home opener in September is one thing; playing while trailing in a road game in November is something else, and that's when we'll really start to see the maturing of J.P. Losman. As one of Buffalo's radio guys pointed out this afternoon, there are some much sterner tests in store for Losman and the Bills.

But.

If the defense's performance yesterday is indicative of the kind of thing they can do all year (they were stingy in the first half and basically slammed the door in the second), and if yesterday's better-than-expected-by-me performance by the offensive line bodes for what this line can accomplish later in the year when it "gels" (they only gave up a single sack, and as the game went on became better at the run-blocking), 6-10 might turn out to be needlessly pessimistic. I'm not revising yet. But stay tuned.

Brief notes from elsewhere:

:: Heavens, Drew Bledsoe sure looked good for Dallas. That was the late game on TV here, and although Bledsoe did look good, I had to laugh when, in the first play of that game that I saw, Bledsoe managed to take a sack despite the fact that his offensive line was holding on the play.

:: How did so many playoff teams from last year forget how to play defense? Especially the Vikings, who have all these good defensive players (more than a few of whom are former Bills)? Is Mike Tice a lackluster coach or something?

:: Call me cynical, but I'm not sure just how "inspired" the people of New Orleans are going to be by their football team's surprise victory yesterday. But maybe I'm full of bird poop on this point.

:: Surely somebody can beat the StuPats? Anyone? Bueller?

Next week the Bills are on the road against Tampa. This should be a much tougher game for Losman and company, so stay tuned.

IMAGES OF THE WEEK

I'm not reproducing any of them here, but go check out this slideshow of Hurricane Katrina's arrival in New Orleans -- before, during, and the awful aftermath. It's riveting and haunting -- especially when you get to the one particular object that somehow avoids being crushed by six tumbling trees. That one will make you think a bit.

UPDATE: Well, so much for that -- it seems that the album isn't available anymore at the original link I had, and thus far I can't find a new one, so it may be gone. Too bad, as it was fascinating. If anyone finds it again (you'll know it when you see it, there are almost 200 pictures in it) leave a link here and I'll update again.

Failing that, the uncrushed object is a statue of Jesus in the yard of a church. Six big oak trees fell all around Jesus, and He kept right on standing. Yes, a sheer coincidence of luck, but a spooky one at that.

Sentential Links #16

Here's the round-up from this week. Not as many as usual, between the monitor problems (now resolved) and the head cold that took my sinuses and mucous membranes out for a spin the last three days.

:: Some would like to see the 'Silver Surfer' but it's tough to visualize that without having a cackle about the rationality of taking a guy on a flying surfboard seriously. (Say, how about a "Galactus" movie? Maybe they could get John Byrne to actually finish "The Last Galactus Story".)

:: For instance, I had nightmares for two nights after seeing 'Scream'. That kind of admission alone might cause some of you to spew green pea soup in digust. (Not soup in disgust, but I did spew Pepsi in laughter. Scream has got to be the least scary horror movie I've ever seen. After an effective opening ten minutes, it's just stupid "teen slasher" shit that was staggeringly unrealistic. Silence of the Lambs was scary. Scream was crap that couldn't decide whether it was an actual horror movie or a parody of a horror movie. And yeah, that's two appearances for the Indestructible Mister Jones on Sentential Links. But since he tends to write five or six posts at a time and then allows his blog to go fallow for weeks or months at a time, so be it.)

:: I'm one of those guys who say, "isn't it about time they stopped playing America The Beautiful at baseball games now?" But, when I glanced at my watch this morning, and realized what the date was, I had a sudden pause. (Actually, it's "God Bless America", not "America the Beautiful", which if I had my way would be our national anthem. Still, yeah, I think it's time to stop singing that thing.)

:: Communism wasn’t fun or funny, folks. It was a dirty, rotten system run by dirty, rotten people that didn’t do shit for the masses. I’m unamused by commu-nostalgia or any other trendy, nouveau communophilia.

:: How wonderful it feels to be in Vienna once again! This imperial city won my heart long ago and I love her with all of my being. (I can't find any kind of permalinks here, so scroll all the way down to the post dated August 30th. Then scroll upward, reading the account of traveling in the land of Mozart. Wonderful stuff. I'd very dearly love to go to Vienna, and listen to the Vienna Philharmonic perform Brahms in the Musikverein....)

:: I shouldn't hate her because she is in a bad situation that is not of her making. I should feel sympathy. Yet, I can't stand her. (What follows is a list of funny things this blogger hates about her officemate. I found this blog purely by accident, in searching for something else. It appears to be about one single woman's life in Washington, DC. I like finding blogs like this; they're a nice detour from my usual political and cultural blog reading.)

:: My prediction is that when George W. Bush leaves office, like Reagan, he will generally be beloved by the American public. (Hey, it's OK. I predicted that the Bills would win the Super Bowl each time they got there, that LA Confidential would beat out Titanic for Best Picture, and that Al Gore would win in 2000. One outta three wasn't bad!)

:: Something about William Hurt makes me want to walk towards the nearest living thing and kill it. (Actually, this isn't PSotD writing, but someone else replying to a question PSotD posed. I think. Anyway, this made me laugh out loud.)

More next week. In theory.

"The City of Dead Works" (a repost)

(I've reposted this story before, but here it is again. I wrote this in response to the terrorist attacks of 9-11-01, about three or four weeks after the actual attacks had taken place. After it was rejected by the single fiction market to which I submitted it, I posted it here.)

"The City of Dead Works"

There is never any rest for me, the Ferryman of the Dead.

I pole my barge across the black waters and up to the pier. So many wait this time, many more than usual. I wonder what has happened, what event has sent me this many. "Come aboard," I say. "I will take your coin for passage." One by one they file past me, each handing to me the coin that they never knew they had. It is the coin which determines where they shall be taken to rest, its metal shaped and determined by life. The coins of these dead are gold, every one of them purest gold. Six thousand come aboard my barge, and each has passage for the farthest and greatest of destinations. In that moment I know that something truly dark has happened; the gold coins are always forged in moments of darkness. I am the Ferryman. I can give them no answers to what lies behind their haunted, questioning eyes. I can only take them on this, the last of all journeys.

When they are all aboard I take up the pole and push away from the pier. The barge always feels the same, no matter how many stand upon its decks. Whether six or six thousand, it is all the same to me. I guide us out onto the River Styx. Some of the people look worried, but there is no need for fear. This river can do them no harm. They are already dead.

This is to be a long journey, I know – it always is, to this destination. As I guide the barge through the black waters, I look on the faces of those who have come to me. As different as these people all look, they all have the same expressions of shock, disbelief, and withering sadness. Here is a man of business, talking into a cell phone. He is trying to call someone, anyone, who will tell him that it’s all a dream, that it didn’t happen, that he didn’t die in a blast of fire, smoke, glass and steel. There is a mother who is explaining to her daughter that they won’t be going to Disneyland after all. And there, a group of firemen stand together, realizing that soon they will meet all their brothers-in-arms who have gone into the infernos before them. So many now – colleagues once in business and now colleagues in death, people who have never before met but now have the gravest thing in common. As the current takes hold, I look back at the pier. There are more gathering there. There are always more. They will wait. Time does not exist for the dead.

"Please," a young man says as he turns to me, "I have to go home to my daughters."

"You are going home now," I reply. "To the home where all eventually return." Two black rocks slide past on either side, the rocks that mark the passage of the circling Styx.

"This can’t be," a woman cries out. "My mother needs me."

"She will be with you soon enough."

"When?" Her voice pleads, and yet there is no solace that is mine to give.

"I cannot say," I reply. "The Ferryman has no hand in Fate."

The tears come then, tears from the six thousand that run over the gunwales and into the river which has been fed by tears for centuries. All tears are born in the River Styx.

"Where will you take us?" someone asks.

"To the place you are promised," I answer. I recall the words of a poet: Will there be beds for all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.

One our left we approach the Hills of the Damned, an endless stretch of shattered lands which reach away into the blackness. The waters echo with the cries of all those who have been taken to the Hills for the agony they have brought on the living. I consider the bag of six thousand gold coins, and I realize that I will have to journey to the Hills this day. There will be a person, perhaps more, who will pay me with a coin of black tin; but not on this journey. As the hills recede behind us, the unending cries of the damned become fainter and fainter until they are drowned out by the lapping of the waters upon the sides of the boat and the marker stones that we pass. The six thousand fall silent, each realizing that it is not a dream. I would offer solace, but as ever I cannot. I am the Ferryman.

We come around a particularly dark bend, and before us lies a very wide expanse of water, as if the Styx has become an ocean – which in some sense it probably has. And beyond that expanse are the thousands of twinkling lights that I have come to know so well. One man, a fireman, sees them too. "What is that?" he asks.


"It is the City of Dead Works," I reply. The lights of the city glow on the horizon, and every one of the six thousand turns toward them as the Styx impels us onward. As we come ever closer to the city, the glittering lights reflect off the black water.

"I don’t understand," someone else says. "The City of Dead Works?"

"Aye," I reply. "Behold!"

From behind us, golden light: the Sun of the Dead is rising as it always does when the dead come near the City. Above us the firmament is turning purple, then blue; soon the light of the Sun will illuminate the City of Dead Works. As the sky lightens, the true scope of that city becomes plain: it stretches away into the land, farther than any eye could see. Not even the highest-soaring raven, cavorting in the breezes and zephyrs of the dead, could take it all in. It is bigger by far than any one city ever built by the hand of men, because it encompasses some part of all of them. Perhaps it is bigger than all of the cities ever built. Now the sun’s first rays come up behind us, and the first buildings can be seen down by the water.

"That one looks Egyptian," a woman says.

"The Great Library of Alexandria," I tell her. "Once the greatest repository of learning the world had ever seen, now only a memory to the living and a reality only to the dead."

A man points to a building high upon a rock. I nod.

"The Temple of Solomon," I say.

"There are ships in the harbor," says another. Thus for him I name the ships: Arizona, Indianapolis, Lusitania, Bismarck, Wilhelm Gustloff, Cap Arcona. And many, many others. I scan over the impossibly vast city and spot Dresden, as it was; and beside it the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And how many smaller villages, tucked into the hills beyond the City? None can say. The Sun of the Dead shines upon those hills now, and the great stone statues in the likeness of Siddhartha Gautama.

"I don’t understand," a young man says. "Why this City? Why here?"

I only shake my head as we continue to float by the City. I do not point out the fairly small, nondescript office building that sits near the water. It is not a particularly remarkable building; nor was it, really, until the fuse was lit. The six thousand almost don’t recognize it.

Almost.

Not one word is uttered as we slide past the Alfred Murrah Federal Building. Then we turn away from the City of Dead Works, and head again down the waters of the Styx toward distant hills and the place where these people will join their brethren.

"Who lives in that city?" It is a priest in a fireman’s coat.

"No one lives there," I tell him. "The City of Dead Works is not for people. It is for the buildings and the ships. It is for the books and the music, the sculptures and the paintings which are gone forever. It is for everything destroyed by craven people in the name of foolish wars, for everything judged forfeit in the face of transitory desires."

The Styx takes us into the Golden Hills. Soon we will be there, and the six thousand will go where they belong. And then the Styx will complete its circle, taking me back to the pier where more dead await.

"We will be there soon," I say. "Soon we will be at the Elysian Fields, where all heroes go – for that is what you all are. It is what you have bought with your lives, with the shaping of your coins into gold." No one replies. We near the last bend now, and before us lie the Elysian Fields, where peace reigns and where heroes dwell; where all is light and voices are always raised in song. The Sun of the Dead shines warmly on Elysium.

But they do not see it. They, the six thousand, all gaze back behind us upon the City of Dead Works. It will soon be behind us forever as we round the last bend of the River Styx into Elysium. I know they all need one last look upon that City, and I do not grudge them that. For myself, I do not look back; the eyes of the Ferryman are ever forward. But I know. I know that the City of Dead Works is different now. I know that it has changed. I know that the people who come with me now to Elysium, the dead around me, look back on the two soaring towers of steel that now rise above the City where there had been no towers before.

I know these things.

I am the Ferryman of the Dead.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oh, my. I'm telling you, if this is what the Imperial stormtroopers had turned out to look like, the Rebels would have surrendered at once.

(Possibly unsafe for work. Via Dave of Britain.)

Say, what WAS the combination to Kirk's safe, anyway?

Blogger J. Marcus Xavier e-mailed me a link to this post of his a while back. Following the link, I found the post interesting, bookmarked it for future reference, and...promptly forgot about it. Whoops.

Anyway, Xavier's thesis -- focusing on F&SF fandom -- is that the producers of F&SF franchises ignore their fandom at their own peril. I'm not sure I completely agree, but it is a generally good point, particularly as illustrated by the way the once-proud Star Trek franchise has run into the ground. Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, for instance, are pretty well reviled nowadays by Star Trek fans, but it's not as though they produced nothing but crap in their Trek tenure. However, most would agree that Berman-and-Braga eventually put too much stock in their own ideas and abilities, leading them to basically (a) run dry on ideas, and (b) assume the quality of the ideas that they still had.

Some would argue that George Lucas ran afoul of the same kind of thing in the Star Wars prequels, but I would disagree, on the basis that the long period in which Star Wars lay fallow (excepting all those "Expanded Universe" books and comics) also saw the latent Star Wars fandom change in its own tastes. I think there's also a danger for fandom itself to fossilize and become unwilling to allow the creators/producers to break free of formula and try something new (for the definitive illustration of this, of course, see Annie Wilkes and Misery).

But Xavier's point is well taken: Sci Fi Producers: We Are Your Word of Mouth. Keeping the fans happy may be difficult, but completely disregarding them? That way madness lies.

(By the way, upon further noodling around Xavier's blog, I see that he's launched a blog-like site called PlanetFandom.com. This is cool, especially since SFSignal seems to be off the air now.)

Comments Policy

I don't think I've ever actually laid forth a policy regarding the comments threads on this blog, but since someone left a bit of spam-like substance in one of my comments threads this morning, it's probably a good time to establish a few pointers.

1. Comments threads are intended to allow readers to offer comment on whatever I write in the post to which the thread is attached. If you have something to say that's not relevant to the particular post in question -- for instance, you have something you think I might be interested in reading or you just want to give a "Hey how you doin'" shout-out -- then use either of my main e-mail addresses, which are listed prominently near the top of the sidebar.

2. Any comments violating Rule #1 will be deleted, and further violations along the same line will result in the ritual banning of IP addresses.

3. My comments threads have never, to my recollection, become cantankerous or angry, so I'm not too worried about this happening in the future. But should it become a concern, let it be noted that I'm not running a message board for flame-fests. I have readers who are quite conservative, and I have readers who are literally Marxists. I'd like to keep that mix of readership, so I do NOT allow personal attacks between readers in the comments. (As I noted, this has never been a problem here before.) I don't have the ability to lock out comments threads on specific posts, so a degree of self-policing by readers is appreciated.

(3a. Exceptions to this rule are that you can make fun of people who don't like the Star Wars prequels or fans of the New England Stupid Patriots. Oh, and the Dutch.)

(3b. I'm kidding about the Dutch. They're a fine people, wooden shoes and all.)

4. Personal attacks upon me are fine, so long as a name and legitimate e-mail are also left. If you're going to attack the blogger, have the fortitude to sign it.

5. To the best of my knowledge, the YACCS comments system is not subject to search engine spiders, which means that there is nothing to be gained in comments-spammers using it. Still, I will delete any mentions of great poker sites, cia11is, v!agra, or any other such thing.

6. More of a pointer: eventually, the word "comment" is replaced on older posts to "archived". This is a YACCS thing; I don't know how it works. I think that you can still comment on those posts by clicking that "archived" link, but I may not see it since I don't log into my YACCS control panel every day. Also, all comments threads disappear eventually, automatically cleared by YACCS.

That's about it.

The Vanilla Life

Lynn officially tagged me with this. There's a noted quote by Robert A. Heinlein, that goes like this:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

I'm supposed to tell which of those I've actually done. OK then:

Change a diaper: Well, duh.

Plan an invasion: Well, I've written about fictional characters planning invasions, so I'm counting this.

Butcher a hog, conn a ship: Nope.

Design a building: Well, I've "designed" dungeons and whatnot for AD&D campaigns in my youth. That counts.

Write a sonnet: Yup. It was a lousy sonnet, though. No, I don't have a copy, and no, I wouldn't post it here if I did. There's a reason why I won't post my Star Wars fanfic here, either.

Balance accounts: Yup. It's easy to do when you're working with single digits, though.

Build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying: Nope. I could figure out how to do all three, though.

Take orders: In more ways than one, actually. I've worked in restaurants, so I've taken orders in that context.

Give orders: I'm not sure if RAH meant this in the military context, but I've been in management before and have done this.

Cooperate, act alone: I do both of these on a daily basis.

Solve equations: Well, I took algebra and trig and calculus.

Analyze a new problem: What kind of "problem"? A math problem, or just a generic problem that crops up in the course of my day?

Pitch manure: Well, not specifically, but I'm counting it by virtue of my cleaning toilets at The Store.

Program a computer: Yes, writing programs like this counts:

10. PRINT "TOM BRADY IS A PANSY"
20. GOTO 10

Cook a tasty meal: You'd better believe I can do this!

Fight efficiently: Not sure what's meant here, actually. I don't really fight.

Die gallantly: Assuming that the characters I write about are some small piece of me, and further assuming that some of them have died gallantly, I am claiming this one.

Well, that was fun, I think. If anything, it further cements my view that RAH was kind of a weird fellow.

Looking at the Bookshelf

Over at Mental Multivitamin, there's a wonderful post in which M-V lists ten books. Not ten books that are her favorites, or ten books that are the "greatest", but ten books that tell us something about the reader. I was about to try and do the same thing, but then I remembered that I did the same thing a while back, here. But rather than force you all to go hopping around my archives, I figure I'll just reproduce the list here. (As regular readers know, I tend to approach "List X Things" list-posts as "List X Things, plus whatever others leap to mind".)

1. Cosmos, Carl Sagan. To this day, this is still the book that has influenced my overall worldview regarding the Universe and our place within it more than any other. I find so much more awe, so much more poetic beauty, so much more reverence in a Universe that is billions of years old and through physical processes eventually gave rise to life and consciousness than I do in the idea of a static Universe popped into being in just six days, six thousand years ago. The science of this book may be out of date, but I don't care. As far as I am concerned, it is a towering achievement of twentieth century science writing.

2. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien. It's pretty obvious why, I think.

3. Salem's Lot, Stephen King. This is the first out-and-out horror book I read, once I was ready to really delve into the genre.

4. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King. This book provided the answers to questions I didn't even know I had.

5. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke. I'm pretty sure I read some science fiction before this, but this one cemented my love of the genre for all time. And not only that, this book showed me what was possible in the genre besides Star Wars space opera and Star Trek "sociological" SF.

6. The Prydain Chronicles, Lloyd Alexander. (Yeah, it's a five book set, actually. Deal with it.) My first encounter with epic fantasy, two years before Tolkien.

7. Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay. It's not my favorite GGK novel, but it's the first that I read, and in the same way 2001 pushed me beyond my original idea of what SF was, Tigana broadened my horizons of what fantasy can do.

8. The Joy of Music and The Infinite Variety of Music, Leonard Bernstein. I group these together because the content of each -- essays, teleplays from Bernstein's TV programs, interviews -- are so similar in style and tone. These two books shaped my love of music more than any others. I always adored Bernstein's ability to adore and venerate a very wide range of music, and I have always tried to follow his example. (This is a man who would as soon conduct Mozart as he would David Diamond.)

9. Dungeon, Fire and Sword: The Knights Templar in the Crusades, John J. Robinson. A fascinating era of history, engagingly written by a writer who didn't produce nearly enough books.

10. The Book of Marvels, Richard Halliburton. This man's travel writings, all of which roughly correspond to the years between the two World Wars, are a clinic on how to convey "sense of wonder". Track down a copy, and when you read it, try to ignore the obvious anachronisms (like the fairly obvious "white man's superiority" stuff, which is par for the course for the book's day).

And, you know, why not a couple of honorable mentions:

11. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud can teach you a great deal about storytelling, and not just about comics.

12. The follow-up, Reinventing Comics, is less about storytelling and more about the possibilities inherent in a digital age.

13. Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman. These will also teach you a great deal about storytelling; and for me, they pretty much squashed any idea that I'd ever try to sell a film script. (Not that I could sell the ones I've already written, of course, because they're Star Wars fan-fictions.)

14. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan. Essential reading, really, in this age of belief in UFOs and holeopathic medicine and various other nonsense items.

15. The House with a Clock in its Walls, John Bellairs. Just because Bellairs is a favorite author of mine, and this is the first of his that I read. Gothic fiction for kids. Great stuff.

16. Danny, the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl. Humor, warmth, darkness, cruelty, love, pain, redemption, and the perfect ending. All in one book.

Looking at this list, I see a disturbing number of titles I haven't re-read lately. And winter, the best season for reading, is on its way!

I also note the presence of several titles from my youth -- the Bellairs, Alexander, and Dahl books, among others that I didn't list but still love -- that were literally forced upon me by my mother, who had a method of punishment for me when I did something that warranted revoking television priveleges: she'd hand me a book she somehow just happened to have at hand and order me to watch no television until I read it. Of course, it was almost always Book One of a multi-volume series.

I like the chain of causality there: I would break some rule or exercise bad judgment, and get my worldview changed forever in return. Seems pretty fair at this point, no?

What's Celtic for "Yoko"?

High on my list of local stuff to do someday has been to catch the Celtic band Kilbrannan live -- but it now looks like I won't be able to do that, since Kilbrannan is breaking up. Dammit.

Anyway, the former members of Kilbrannan are forming two new groups: Penny Whiskey (featuring Kilbrannan's lead singer, Kirk McWhorter) and Stone Row. Oh well; at least I'll be able to someday hear those two acts.

Kilbrannan's last performances are as follows:

Sep 9: Buffalo Irish Center 9pm-1am
Sep 10: South Buffalo Feis, Cazenovia Park, Buffalo 1:30pm-2:30pm

Last Performance:

Sep 24 Buffalo Irish Center 9pm-1am

Bummer, but best of luck to both bands.